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Playa Girón: the demi-centennial

by acanuck 4/18/2011 - 2:33 am

Bay of Pigs museum

We've been commemorating failed rebellions lately, so it's worth noting this is the 50th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Or, as the sign at the entrance to the Playa Girón beach resort puts it (in Spanish): "First Defeat of Yanqui Imperialism in the Americas."

It was a rather spectacular failure. The CIA, under Allen Dulles, had convinced itself (and President Eisenhower) that it could spark a popular uprising and overthrow Fidel Castro with an armed force of just 1,500 U.S.-armed Cuban rebels. The final version of the CIA plan was presented to John Kennedy just days after he was sworn in.

The invasion was set for April 17, 1961. Castro wasn't caught offguard because the CIA had attacked airfields two days earlier with B-26s painted in Cuban air force markings. Presumably to pretend Castro's military was rebelling. Nobody bought it.

Long story short: Cubans didn't flock to side with the rebels, who barely managed to get off the beaches. Within 72 hours, over 100 of them were dead and more than 1,200 captured. In late 1962, the U.S. ransomed the survivors for $53 million in food and medicine.

In the wake of the invasion, Castro declared the revolution Marxist and firmly embraced the Soviet Union, the U.S. turned its partial embargo into a near-total one, Allen Dulles was fired for incompetence, and the Cuban missile crisis took us all to the brink of World War III. (U.S. intelligence was unaware the Soviet missiles were already nuclear-armed and local commanders had the authority to fire if American troops invaded. Yikes!)  

In the mid-1980s, I visited Playa Girón as a tourist. With no American visitors, the Cubans welcomed Canadians -- and especially their hard currency. They visibly detested the East German apparatchiks who arrived around the same time, who were bossy, rude and didn't tip. They could, however, drink and party like the repressed bureaucrats they were.

There's a modest museum at the resort, dedicated to the invasion and of interest to any history buff. I had rented a family villa, one in a few dozen strung out along the shore. Every day, as we headed to or from the main hotel complex, we would pass a villa identical to ours, but cordoned off with a rope fence. It had been preserved in the state the invasion left it a quarter-century earlier, a shell with its roof caved in by a bomb.

Happy Batalla de Girón Day, everyone.

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What was lacking at the Bay of Pigs was backing of a US President and thus, the US military.

The next confrontation with communism was handled differently than the Cuba fiasco that caused CIA Director Allen Dulles to be fired by the President whose death he would soon sit in judgment over, as one of the seven members of the Warren Commission. Dulles and company found that the President had been dispatched by a lone gunman, who denied the dirty deed before he too was dispatched, and forever silenced, while in police custody. As a result, a new more compliant President was installed, and a fake incident involving a US warship under attack by sea borne commies was arranged at the Gulf of Tonkin, just  9 months after the change of Presidents. The CIA concocted incident with the US warship, which never happened, was dutifully reported by the ever unquestioning corporate media, and was solemnly used as a justification for a really big war to protect freedom.  This war would be on the other side of the planet, not 90 miles off the Florida coast in Cuba.  The Bay of Pigs - where even with the close proximity of Cuba to US shores, the detente pursuing JFK had refused to engage US troops.

 

by NCD 4/18/2011 - 11:11 am

I didn't mention Kennedy's assassination among the events that followed from the Bay of Pigs. But yeah, it's clear that Lee Harvey Oswald, despite his professed Marxism, was deeply involved with the same CIA/mob/anti-Castro-Cuban cabal that botched the invasion.

My own best guess is that Oswald thought he was part of a CIA-run fake attempt on the president's life, to be pinned on Castro in order to justify a U.S. invasion. Remember, his first shot (from the closest range) totally missed. Too late, Oswald realized he was, as he put it, "the patsy" in a much more ambitious plot. Dulles's job on the Warren Commission was to scrub any hint of that from the report. The incoming president refused to follow the CIA scenario, but knew the military-industrial-congressional complex was demanding war -- any war. He gave them Vietnam instead.

I could be wrong, of course. Maybe Oswald was a lone, crazed gunman.

by acanuck 4/18/2011 - 2:17 pm (re: NCD)

Oswald was not a communist except as he was 'sheepdipped' into appearing as one prior to his role in Dallas, by his intelligence agency handlers. DA Jim Garrison, in On the Trail of the Assassins,  describes Oswald's compatriots in NO, as all right wingers with access to arms left over from the plan to invade Cuba, and associated with anti-Castro, anti-communist, even anti-Charles DeGaulle groups (French far right OAS-wanted to get rid of DeGaulle over his plan for independence of Algeria).

From an essay on the JFK assassination by Vicent Salandria, 1998, A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes:

.......President Kennedy was killed because he had refused to bomb and to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, although the Joint Chiefs and the CIA were much for this course of action. Later he had refused, when opposed by the Joint Chiefs and the CIA, to consent to invading Cuba during the missile crisis. Instead of invading Cuba, against the expressed wishes of the Joint Chiefs and the CIA, he had chosen to negotiate with the Soviets over a commitment not to invade Cuba......

.....Was President Kennedy's Vietnam policy one of the reasons why he was killed? There has been much speculation and debate on what President Kennedy would or would not have done in Vietnam had he not been killed.........I would tend to believe that the man who twice refused to submit to the Joint Chiefs and the CIA on bombing and invading Cuba a mere ninety miles from our shore would not have consented to sending hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops half way around the world to slaughter Vietnamese peasants......

by NCD 4/18/2011 - 5:12 pm (re: acanuck)

Garrison's not my most trusted source on the assassination, but he's right about whom Oswald hung out with in New Orleans. A seedy lot. And I share your view that his "defection" to the Soviet Union was pure sheepdip.

by acanuck 4/18/2011 - 6:40 pm (re: NCD)

And the same to you, acanuck!

Kevin Gosztola at my.fdl has a piece up about it, too; thought you might enjoy it.

A little Cubano music from the Buena Vista Social Club?

 

by we are stardust 4/18/2011 - 11:16 am

Gosztola does a good job linking the Playa Girón fiasco with current U.S. foreign-policy adventurism. Thanks.

by acanuck 4/18/2011 - 2:20 pm (re: we are stardust)

And I just ran across this at AJE; snarkily titled "Viva the Capitalist Revolution?".

You know, add a 'few' austerity measures, increase some foreign investment; they peg you with 'capitalism'.   ;o)

 

by we are stardust 4/18/2011 - 6:58 pm (re: acanuck)

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